SOURCE: '"We Are Mock'd With Art': The Winter's Tale," in The Promised End: Romance Closure in the Gawain-poet, Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 89-117.

[In this essay, Lenz divides the play into three distinct sections, associating each with a certain genre and outlining the steps of the "prepared surprise" as a structural unit.]

Romance, like all modes, creates and maintains a consistent fictive world, an other world with laws unto itself, so events in The Winter's Tale can fall out "like an old tale," differently than they would in "real life." Because that other world does not behave according to "normal" expectations, romance asks that we adjust our vision to meet its own. In fact, romance closure, the sense of eucatastrophic achievement, depends upon the confirmation of its vision, as we have seen in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Faerie Queene. The author must therefore assist his readers to make the necessary adjustment. Medieval romance's literary ancestry gives the author the various ethical systems that complicate the action, setting one knight in conflict with another and sometimes with himself. By watching which system (knight) prevails we recognize that story's values. In an art romance, one that imitates the medieval version, the author more deliberately toys with generic conventions. The encyclopedic Faerie Queene contains epic, chivalric romance, chronicle, historical allegory, pastoral, and myth, Spenser using them to enrich his make-believe world, to provide a background for his knights, and to facilitate our understanding of his vision by presenting something familiar: poetry teaches us what we already know. Our participation in romance does not rely on the other world's similarity to the "real" world; it relies on our familiarity with other literary genres.

Walter F. Eggers, who examines how "traditional generic distinctions function in a reader's or audience's experience," describes how the reader discovers a given text's genre: "we inevitably make successive, unsatisfactory guesses about the nature of a work as a whole, until, to satisfy ourselves, we make a last guess at its 'intrinsic' genre."¹ The language ourselves, we make a last guess at its 'intrinsic' genre."¹ The language recalls our discussions of closure. It too is a "last guess" about the "nature of the work as a whole," a guess confirmed by a revelation: the Gawain-poet's envoi, Malory's explicit, Chaucer's palinode, and, most notably, Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos, each breaks the fiction's bounds by revealing its artificiality. Since romance's generic catholicity makes it perhaps the most artificial mode, it requires this sort of acknowledgment to close, to identify its otherness. In other words, regardless of the ordering principle, whether narrative, spatial, or revelatory, revelation is inherent in romance closure. The Winter's Tale offers a prime example of romance as a revelatory mode.

Partly because of its ending, partly because of its beginning, we are not quite sure what to label The Winter's Tale. Eggers describes too well our critical experience. We make "successive, unsatisfactory guesses about the nature" of the play, for it is protean, changing its shape before our eyes. The play owes much of its elusiveness to its allusiveness. It belongs to tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, pastoral, and romance—or, rather, all of these belong to the play.² The fascination with identifying each and every genre in it bears out Eggers' contention that we are not comfortable with a fiction until we know its nature.

Despite the recognition that The Winter's Tale presents Polonius' rare combination of "tragical-comicalhistorical-pastoral" or Quince's "very tragical mirth" (a recognition of its literary origins), there seems to be an irresistible tendency to discuss the similarity between Shakespeare's creation and the "real world." Howard Felperin, one of the latest and best of the play's commentators, focuses on the "lifelike characterization" which, to some extent, is effected by the play's varied descent from Greek romance, chivalric romance, and the mystery and morality plays.³ "The best romance," he writes, "manages to pass itself off as the image of the real" by "shadowing or qualifying or problemetizing the triumphs it presents."⁴ A touch of tragedy, like Mamillius' death, makes romance seem more "real." Likewise, for Fitzroy Plye, "Shakespeare's Romances are the comedies of a man who having written the tragedies is not prepared to cut the material of life to the customary measure of comedy."⁵ Again we have the generic blend and again we have the confusion of literary and "real" worlds. What these critics describe as the "lifelike" quality of The Winter's Tale results from the density achieved by Shakespeare's combining several generic intentions and expectations. Just as the epic context of The Faerie Queene contributes a sense of narrative progress, the record of the hero's trials which informs the final realization of his quest, so too the dramatic context of The Winter's Tale forces the romance to accommodate the theatre's demands. Unlike narrative, where episode follows episode and where the reader is free to pick up and put down the book at will, drama assumes an immediate ending. Since drama is performance oriented, the play must be presented within certain prescribed time limits, hence the popularity of the unity of time, in which the plot time should concur with the performance time. Thus the dramatic structure itself, the plot, can reflect the impending conclusion. In The Tempest, for instance, Prospero names the hours between two and six as the time needed to complete his scheme, and he repeatedly measures the time left to him. If nothing else, a stop to the action and an epilogue tell us the play is over. Ideally, however, drama shares with romance the self-fulfilling prophecy. From the beginning the playwright sets his dominoes so that in the last act he can tip one to make the whole line fall, revealing the discrete units to be part of a unified, coherent design. Long ago Aristotle defined the complex plot, one which provided an end that both reversed the situation and provoked a recognition, as the best possible dramatic design. For Aristotle, drama, especially tragedy, must always work towards an end: "the structure of events, the plot, is the goal of tragedy, and the goal is the greatest thing of all."⁶

Still, drama is more than a narrative: it is a representation. Sir Philip Sidney explains the difference "betwixt reporting and representing": "As, for example, I may speak (though I am hereof Peru, and in speech digress from that to the description of Calicut); but in action I cannot represent it without Pacolet's horse." And he complains about too much reporting being done on the stage: "you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin by telling where he is, or the tale will not be conceived."⁷ Anyone would think that he had just seen Antony and Cleopatra. Nevertheless, dramatists are cautious about "representing" without a warning that their show is only pretense. So much does Bottom worry about his audience's gullibility (or, more likely, his own ability) that he asks Quince to "Write me a prologue, and let that prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords." "This," he concludes, "will put them out of fear"( MND, 3.1.16-21).⁸ We may smile at Bottom's simplicity, but dramatists possess a cabinet of tranquilizers to put their audiences out of fear. Stages, costumes, actors and acting, sets, asides, apostrophes, prologues, epilogues, all blatantly advertise the play's fictiveness. In drama we are especially challenged to suspend our disbelief because we are so often reminded of the need for belief.

Drama's self-reflexive or self-revelatory conventions complement romance's penchant for calling attention to itself, especially as it reaches its end. In the previous chapter we noted how Spenser develops the correspondence between the knight's quest and the poet's as Book Six draws to its close, making Calidore, as well as Colin, a figure for the poet. A tale's open admission of its literariness does not necessarily undermine its acceptability. In fact, William Nelson, who traces the debate between fact and fiction during the Renaissance, sees self-consciousness as a rhetorical trick played by romancers to escape the classical, humanist, and moral charges against them for lying:

But the proper relationship between the author and his audience required a mutual understanding that the story was neither history told 'for true' nor a childish confusion of make-believe with real, but a transparent device calculated to appeal to a less-than-serious aspect of human nature.⁹

When a writer admits his tale is a fiction, he asks that we do not impose sense on the tale; in time the tale will make its own sense to us, and its sense, as Spenser insists in Book Six's final stanza, is to give pleasure. The romance writer, like Bottom, does not want his audience to fear a live lion when they should enjoy a make-believe one, or, more pertinently, to confuse a real bear with a stage bear.

But the point where having fun becomes making fun is difficult to establish precisely. Self-consciousness in a story can turn too easily from a "device calculated to appeal to the less-than-serious aspect of human nature" to a device calculated to ridicule. Here drama is particularly dangerous to romance. The very fact that we can see the characters limits the range of their actions. To produce on stage Redcrosse's fight with the dragon, as Spenser describes it and with the same effect, is of course impossible. We expect human actors to behave according to normal human motivations and within certain boundaries of action, time, and space.¹⁰ This mimetic expectation makes drama a natural form to satirize romance fantasies, as it does in The Old Wive's Tale and The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

In The Winter's Tale Shakespeare uses drama to test the credibility of his romance vision. Throughout the play he alternates between representation and report, between dramatic performance and tall story telling, an alternation evidenced in the play's structure. It divides into three distinct sections, each associated with a specific genre and each reflecting one means by which closure can be attained. Part One (Acts I, II, III) uses a causal narrative reminiscent of tragic plot to order events; Part Two (Act IV) establishes an enclosed space on the pastoral Bohemian island and alters the narrative to an analogical order; Part Three (Act V) presents the statue scene, the eucatastrophe which reveals the play's true kind, a miraculous balance between dramatic belief and romance incredibility.

I

While certainly not a satire, The Winter's Tale demonstrates how drama alters romance material and how the intercourse between the two satisfies and frustrates audience expectations of both. The legitimacy of Leontes' much debated jealousy affords a fine example. Critics divide into two schools on this matter: those, like Northrop Frye, for whom "the jealousy explodes without warning"; and those, like Neville Coghill, who see the "fuse already burning early in I.ii."¹¹ The first group regards the jealousy as romantic or incredible, the second as dramatic or credible. Both are correct.

The suddenness and ferocity of Leontes' jealousy are surprising, and Shakespeare alters his source, Robert Greene's Pandosto, to accent the surprise. Although Greene outlines the plot, "Wherein Pandosto (furiously incensed by causelesse Jealousie) procured the death of his most loving and loyall wife," he does take pains to show there is some cause for Pandosto's suspicion: the constant companionship between Bellaria and Egistus, their secret meetings in the garden, and Bellaria's provocative habit of "coming her selfe into his [Egistus'] bed chamber to see that nothing should be amis to mislike him."¹² Yet, despite appearances, we have Greene's assurance that Pandosto's jealousy is causeless.

In The Winter's Tale, however, we have no general announcement of plot. All of our early information concerning Leontes and Polixenes details their long friendship, their alliance, Leontes' promised visit, and the extension of Polixenes' present stay. Just prior to admitting his jealousy, Leontes and Hermione recall their courtship, when

Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand
And clap thyself my love.

(I.ii. 102-04)

Leontes' marital suspicion contrasts sharply, and unexpectedly, with his premarital hopes. In his extreme passion he turns his suspicion against the most innocent party present, Mamillius:

Art thou my boy? (I.ii.120)

Art thou my calf? (127)

Most dear'st! my collop! Can thy dam?—may't be? (127)

He subsequently makes his plans to murder Polixenes, his lifelong friend. The sheer irrationality of Leontes' behavior tells us he is mistaken, just as surely as if Shakespeare had followed Greene's example by explaining the plot in a prologue. Greene sets jealousy against a background of suspicious actions; Shakespeare sets jealousy against a background of long established mutual amity—"They were trained together in their childhoods; and there rooted between them such affection, which cannot choose but branch now" (I.i.22-24). The eruption of Leontes' jealousy in the face of "such affection" shocks us. Where we accept Pandosto's jealousy, partly because it seems more rational, we take exception to Leontes' sudden outburst.

Yet, as Coghill has shown, careful analysis of I.ii reveals that we are prepared for Leontes' explosion. Leontes' efforts to persuade Polixenes to extend his visit are terse and perfunctory, to the point that Hermione scolds, "You, sir, / Charge him too coldy" (29-30). Leontes' cold manner, his silence while Hermione and Polixenes banter, and his possible sarcasm—"Is he won yet?" (86)—all indicate something is amiss. Leontes promptly identifies that something:

But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,
As they are now, and making practiced smiles
As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh, as 'twere
The mort o' th' deer—O, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows.

(115-19)

Leontes' confession of jealousy invites us to reinterpret the earlier dialogue. Camillo's remark about the friendship "which cannot choose but branch now" takes on a double-meaning: that which was united must now divide, an ominous prediction of the succeeding action. We can even trace the logic that leads Leontes to conclude he has been cuckolded. Hermione insists that Polixenes stay, and persuades him to do so after Leontes has failed—"At my request he would not" (87). When the topic is courtship and sexual temptation, Hermione confuses (for Leontes at least) who sinned with whom:

Th' offenses we have made you do we'll answer,
If you first sinned with us and that with us
You did continue fault and that you slipped not
With any but with us.

(83-86)

Her statement is triply ambiguous. She could mean "you" (Polixenes and Leontes) sinned with "us" (Polixenes' wife and Hermione); or "you" (Polixenes) with "us" (his wife and Hermione); or "you" (Polixenes) with "us" (Hermione, using the royal plural). The ambiguity increases when Hermione teases, "I have spoken to the purpose twice":

The one for ever earned a royal husband,
The other for some while a friend.

(106-08)

The parallel clauses encourage Leontes to equate the two purposes. Hermione's payment to the "earned" (the correct verb to fill the ellipsis) friend is the same as her payment to the "earned" husband: the marriage bed.

What surprises us about Leontes' jealousy is that it makes sense, despite its sharp contrast to former friendship and love. Like Greene, Shakespeare provides evidence, or the suggestion of evidence, to make his protagonist's jealousy plausible. Unlike Greene, whose continual exclamations of Bellaria's innocence and Pandosto's "causelesse Jealousie" force sympathy for her and antipathy for him, Shakespeare allows the drama itself to guide our responses. The pastoral tranquility which fosters friendship and love is subtly undercut by hints of discord. The opposition is focused when Leontes admits his jealousy, as much a recognition for us as it is for him. Coghill calls this the technique of the "prepared surprise."¹³ The audience is given an expectation that the dramatist can play upon and later confirm. Frank Kermode, we remember, defines this ironic process as peripeteia, the falsification of expectations which discovers "something real." By reversing the flow of our naive expectations an author can provoke our recognition of the true course of events. In Leontes' case, we believe that all is well in Sicilia, that Leontes, Hermione, and Polixenes dwell in mutual friendship and harmony. Leontes upsets this belief when his jealousy erupts. But because that jealousy concurs with bits of information embedded in the dialogue, we can accept it as plausible, even if it conflicts with our original beliefs and even if we think Leontes mistaken.

The "prepared surprise" constitutes the basic structural unit of The Winter's Tale. We can identify a set formula which the "surprise" follows: a prophetic statement; a series of remarks, actions and events that substantiate the prophecy; and the ironic fulfillment of the original statement. This pattern, which recalls romance closure through prophetic fulfillment, can be found in the play's plot skeleton. There is the oracle about finding that which is lost, the scenes devoted to the lost one, Perdita, and her eventual restoration to her father, each step corresponding to a section of the play as I have divided it: prediction (Part One), substantiation (Part Two), fulfillment (Part Three). Curiously, Shakespeare takes even greater care to ground his scenes' trueness as the play develops and as the action becomes more dramatically preposterous.

Let us take for example Antigonus' unfortunate demise, which concludes Part One. Shakespeare's most famous stage direction distresses some and delights others. "The deep damnation of his taking off," so detestable to Arthur Quiller-Couch, evokes peals of laughter from Coghill, at least as he would stage it.¹⁴ In the bear scene S. L. Bethel hears the "deliberate creaking of stage machinery" which "draws attention to the play as play by obtruding matters of technique upon the audience."¹⁵ As we have noticed, the deliberate advertisement of the play as play distances the audience from the action, permitting them to view it with that "less-than-serious aspect of human nature." Whether he used a real bear or a man in costume, Shakespeare does not want to affright the ladies.

As he does with Leontes' jealousy, which surprises because it makes subtle sense against the tenor of the opening scene, Shakespeare carefully prepares us for the bear's entrance. Antigonus predicts his own death when he begs Leontes to save the baby's life: "I'll pawn the little blood I have left / To save the innocent" (II.iii.166-67). The statement is reinforced by Leontes' curt "It shall be possible" (168) and by his charging Antigonus to abandon the baby "On thy soul's peril and thy body's torture" (181). Later, when cataloging the suffering caused by Leontes, but before Antigonus lands in Bohemia, Paulina mourns "my own lord, / who is lost too" (III.ii.230-1). And, just prior to leaving the baby, Antigonus reflects on his dream in which Hermione warns "thou ne'er shalt see / Thy wife Paulina more" (IILiii.35-36). Thus, Antigonus' death is heralded from several quarters. Even the manner of his death has its harbingers. When he accepts Leontes' charge Antigonus prays that "Wolves and bears" will show the baby mercy (II.iii. 187). When they arrive in Bohemia, the Mariner cautions that "this place is famous for the creatures / of prey that keep upon't" (III.iii. 12-13). The timing of these statements, one following Antigonus' pawning his life for Perdita' s, the other preceding the actual exchange, underscores the irony inherent in the bear's fulfillment of the predictive statements. Rather than being a haphazard or lazy stage trick, "Exit pursued by a bear" belongs to the basic structural pattern of the play, initiated by Leontes' jealousy and completed by the statue.

In The Winter's Tale Shakespeare makes his metaphors literal. The friendship cannot choose but branch now, and does. Antigonus names "that which is lost" Perdita. When he first takes up the baby Antigonus hopes that Nature will show it mercy:

Come on, poor babe.
Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens
To be thy nurses. Wolves and bears, they say,
Casting their savageness aside, have done
Like offices of pity.

(II.iii.184-88)

He is thinking of rumors, stories, myths, like that of Daphnis and Chloe, in which beasts act more humanely toward abandoned babies than the bestial humans who abandoned them. But Antigonus does not really believe such a thing will—or even can—happen; he merely wishes for it to be so. Without casting its savageness aside the bear does perform an office of pity. It pursues Antigonus instead of falling upon the helpless Perdita, evidently preferring old goat to lamb. "They are never curst but when they are hungry," the Clown asserts. With its belly full of Antigonus the bear poses no threat to Perdita, thus saving her to be found by the Shepherd. We experience the same surprise or irony here that we do when we realize the plausibility of Leontes' jealousy. Events fall out in nearly the exact terms that Antigonus predicts: he does pawn his life for Perdita's and a bear does perform a peculiar office of pity.

Not only does the episode provide another example of the prepared surprise, it also punctuates the first part of the play without closing it. The bear scene makes the transition from prediction to substantiation, from Sicilia to Bohemia, from court to country, from tragedy to pastoral, without breaking the play at the seams. Because it occupies the last scene of the first major section of the play, the bear reflects back on the previous action as well as forecasts subsequent events.

The bear scene completes a series of predictions about Antigonus' death. It also begins to substantiate Apollo's oracle: "the king shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found" (III.ii.134-36). "That which is lost," Perdita, is found by the Shepherd while the bear dines on Antigonus. The scene also rehearses much of the action. After his dream, Antigonus correctly names the baby but mistakenly deduces that Hermione did sin with Polixenes, recalling for us the original cause for his presence in Bohemia. The rehearsal continues with the Shepherd's entrance, his opening lines summarizing the plot so far:

I would there were no age between ten and
three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest;
for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches
with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.

(III.iii.58-61)

A woman got with child has delivered her baby, ancient friends, traditions, and gods have been wronged, reputations and lives have been stolen, friend and friend, king and subject, husband and wife have all fought.

In the first section Shakespeare seems to strive for lifelike characterization and for action that imitates nature. His characters remember things past and lost. They are conscious of time's passing—Polixenes is nine months in Sicilia, his sailors have expected his departure for two days, he quibbles with Leontes about staying another week or month, the messengers take twenty-three days to journey to Delphos and back. His characters weep, take sick, give birth, get angry and jealous, make mistakes, repent, die: they represent that illusion of reality once described as "rounded" characters. Shakespeare moves his plot from scene to scene and act to act with an expedience fit for tragedy. The Winter's Tale opens with a brief history of Leontes, Polixenes, and Hermione, presents Leontes' jealousy, and develops, in quick succession, the immediate consequences of his jealousy—Camillo's defection and Polixenes' fight, Hermione's trial, Perdita's birth and the queen's "death," all without a single digression. Messengers are sent to Delphos; therefore we have a scene (III.i) showing their return, introduced by a servant in II.iii and followed by the delivery of the oracle in III.ii. The sequence of events is ordered by cause-effect logic. The first section of the The Winter's Tale contains an economic, concentrated tragedy, Shakespeare demonstrating that he can observe the unities of action and place.

The bear, however, chases tragedy from the scene. Even while reminding us of the previous action III.iii alters our perspective on that action. The change of locale from Sicilia to Bohemia changes the tragic vision to comic. In Sicilia we witness Othello-like jealousy and the cost of that jealousy—estranged friends, a dead son, a supposedly dead wife, an exiled daughter. In Bohemia life is different. It is a place where a shepherd believes in fairies ("It was told me I would be rich by the fairies. This is some changling"), a place where a man's dream comes true (Antigonus does not see Paulina again), a place "famous for the beasts of prey that keep upon't" where myth ("Wolves and bears, they say") is realized. In the very act of recording yet another casualty to Leontes' tyranny Shakespeare asserts the significance of the new locale.¹⁶ We are startled to see a bear chase a man across the stage, startled, I think, to laughter. Shakespeare confirms this response by following the bear with the Shepherd and the Clown. The Clown's description of the shipwreck and the bear's dinner, his comparison of the tossed ship to a cork in a hogshead, his inability, like Dogberry's, to keep track of his points, are all genuinely humorous. By making light of the twin disasters, which are a direct result of the tragic action in the first section, at the conclusion of that section, Shakespeare transmutes the tragedy into comedy.

Yet even this generic exchange has its preparation. Veins of comedy course through the first part of The Winter's Tale. For one thing Shakespeare bases his characters on stock comedy personnel. Antigonus, for instance, is the harassed husband, a Noah with a nagging wife. Throughout Paulina's attempt to persuade the King to accept Hermione's baby (II.iii), Leontes rails at Antigonus:

What, canst thou rule her? (46)

Thou dotard, thou art woman-tired, unroosted
By the Dame Partlet here

(74-75)

He dreads his wife. (79)

And, lozel, thou art worthy to be hanged
That wilt not stay her tongue.

(108-09)

If Antigonus is the hen-pecked husband, Paulina is the pecking hen: "Dame Partlet," "Lady Margery," "A callat of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband" (91-92). But these insults flow from Leontes, the imaginary cuckold, the petty tyrant who out-Herods Herod. His exaggerated jealously and irrationality make him an object of humor too, as he himself realizes: "Camillo and Polixenes / Laugh at me, make their pastime at my sorrow" (II.ii.23-24).¹⁷ Antigonus, the touchstone used to detect Leontes' true metal, agrees: his king's behavior will raise us "To laughter, as I take it, if the good truth were known" (II.i.198-99). Similarly, he reduces Leontes' threat to hang all husbands who cannot quiet their wives to its logical absurdity:

Hang all the husbands
That cannot do that feat, you'll leave yourself
Hardly one subject.

(II.iii.110-12)

The king, in fact, would probably hang himself, for, as far as he knows, he cannot keep his wife faithful, let alone quiet. Such nuggets scattered over the first part of the play hint at the wealth to be mined in the second.

With the entrance of the Shepherd and the Clown, obvious representatives of pastoral and comedy, we recognize, if we had not already, that the "rounded" participants in the domestic tragedy belong to stock comedy after all. Now we see Leontes' dark suspicions through the shepherd's eyes: "This has been some stairwork, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work" (III.iii.73-75). The pastoral setting that ends this section links up with the pastoral descriptions that begin the play, thus encasing the intervening tragic action in, as Florizel will say, "a swain's wearing." The tragic impact is mitigated by these comic and pastoral elements, bringing about a re-cognition of the first section. We begin to get at "the good truth."

In its reassessment of certain thematic structures, this end functions like the close of a complete work. But because the play is only at its midpoint Shakespeare must leave some strings untied. Our romance expectations call for Leontes and Perdita's reunion. The oracle reinforces that expectation and opens the possibility that Leontes' question, "Shall I live on to see this bastard kneel / And call me father?"—needs to be answered. The Shepherd's promise to take up the baby "for pity" (and for fairy gold) requires depiction. Finally, although we do not know it yet, the Clown's report of the twin disasters—

how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them, and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than the sea or weather

(III.ii.94-97)—

anticipates the close of the play, when Leontes will remark how "we are mock'd with art."

II

At the end of Part One Shakespeare transfers his scene to Bohemia, a place where dreams, myths, and oracles come true. He begins the Bohemian interlude with that iconic anachronism, Father Time, using him to bridge the "wide gap" between the play's parts; he ends it by returning his cast to Sicilia, once more dislocating the action. Thus the play's second part is confined to that idyllic enclosed space, the pastoral island, a space delineated in the play itself. This new locale allows Shakespeare to continue the comic trend from the previous scene, strengthened by a new narrative order, and to explore dramatically pastoral's reflexive landscape—the outward show that mirrors an inner reality.

At his simplest Father Time makes a transition from Leontes to Perdita, from prediction to substantiation; on a more complex level, he reminds the audience about who controls the play. Time emblemmatizes, literally, the joining of the dramatic and the romantic. Using him Shakespeare leaps over place and time, committing the fault that so annoyed Sidney:

Impute it not a crime
To me, or to my swift passage, that I slide
O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my pow'r
To o'erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o'erwhelm custom.

(IV.i.4-9)

He ushers a player on stage to report the change in years, leaving "the growth untried" or unrepresented. As hundreds of years of commentary tells us, dramatic "law" and "custom" argue against such practice, but Time is Shakespeare's "Pacolet's horse." Shakespeare defies one dramatic custom, the unity of time, by employing another, the chorus. What's more, Time knows he is a character in a play. He steps from one kind of fiction, the emblem book, onto another, the stage. He is both a "chorus" addressing "Gentle Spectators" and the symbol for time, winged, carrying a glass, identifying himself in riddles:

I, that please some, try all, both in joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings.

(1-4)

The obvious—and yet ambiguous—riddle can be applied to the author as well, for he too pleases some and tries all. To demonstrate his power over law, Time passes from Leontes, definitely a tried man whose error has been made and unfolded and who has tasted the terror of badness, to Perdita, whom Time hints will enjoy goodness.

In a sense, Time is the playwright.¹⁸ By calling attention to his own conventionality Time shows the other conventional characters in bold relief: the shepherd, the Clown, the cuckold, the shrew, "a son o'th' King's," and "A shepherd's daughter." He claims the play as "my tale." He even predicts, in general terms, the remaining plot:

A shepherd's daughter
And what to her adheres, which follows after,
is the argument of Time.

(27-29)

The most telltale sign, however, is his instruction to the audience:

imagine me,
Gentle Spectator, that I now may be
In fair Bohemia, and remember well,
I mentioned a son o'th'King's which Florizel
I now name to you.

(19-23)

We remember well that this is Father Time's first appearance, and that only Polixenes and Leontes have mentioned the king's son, back when these characters were first introduced. Time here speaks for the playwright, with whom he shares a "self-born" power. Like Puck, Rosalynde, and Prospero, who beg for applause at the ends of their plays, and most like Gower, who acts as guide through Pericles, Father Time interrupts The Winter's Tale to arrange the play and reassure the audience. We may also remember the subtitle of Shakespeare's source: "The Triumph of Time." At its start, then, the second part's outward show reveals a truth, the playwright's debt to both dramatic and narrative custom.

The triumph that follows—and there is something processional about Act IV—exhibits a narrative order different from causation. It follows a method more familiar in Shakespeare's comedies, that of introducing several characters or character groups in a series of scenes, with little apparent regard for unity of action, and then weaving them all together. The lovers, fairies, and mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's Dream provide an ideal example. Shakespeare presents each group in a series of scenes (I.i, I.ii, II.i) in which the groups announce their reasons for going to the forest on midsummer night. The scenes do not logically advance the supposed main plot, the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. However, the scenes do explore the play's subject matter—marital love—by replacing Theseus and Hippolyta with three very different versions of their relationship: the Athenian quartet's premarital misadventures, Pyramus and Thisbe's tragic elopement, and Oberon and Titania's marital quarrel. At the play's end, when each group has had intercourse, of one kind or another, with the others we recognize the matter that holds the plots together. This development of a comedy by thematic variation and association approximates romance's analogical narrative, for both contain multiple plots unified by their "matter."

So it is with Father Time, Polixenes and Camillo, and Autolycus and the Clown, who appear in scenes i,ii, and iii, respectively. Part One's direct narrative, together with the clues about what comes next, leads us to expect Perdita as the next order of business. Instead, Shakespeare introduces new characters. Father Time and Autolycus each makes his first appearance, and two others, Polixenes and Camillo, have not been seen since I.ii. Only the Clown, who does not appear until the third scene, belongs to the set of characters who end Part One. Further, the action of each scene seemingly bears little relation to the others: Father Time tells us Perdita is next, but she does not appear; instead Camillo talks of returning to Sicilia while Polixenes plans to spy on his son's affairs; then Autolycus enters to rob the Clown. The scenes are only tangentially related by their reference to Perdita, just as the wood connects the groups in A Midsummer Night's Dream. However, they do triangulate on scene iv, the sheep shearing festival, where Shakespeare collects the first three scenes together by repeating their order: Perdita and Florizel wooing, as Time hints; Polixenes testing his son; and Autolycus again duping rustics. True, the section does follow a general plot line—"A shepherd's daughter/And what to her adheres"—but it is the scenes' thematic unity that really binds them together.

The fourth act consists of four scenes that adhere to Perdita, but the main plot is secondary to the matter of identity. "Any well constructed comedy," writes Northrop Frye, will contain three phases: a Period of Preparation (the initial social block—parental interference, exile, and so on); a Period of License (loss of identity), and a Period of Festivity (discovery of identity).¹⁹ Each phase can be associated with successive scenes in Part Two. Polixenes prepares to interfere with his son (ii). Autolycus adopts a new identity to separate the Clown from his purse (iii). Polixenes discovers himself to Florizel, and Perdita is thought to be something more than she seems (iv). But the loss of identity, a matter closely tied to the finding of Perdita, the next step needed to substantiate the oracle, predominates over the action. We are not faced with one lost identity, we are faced with many. Polixenes and Camillo, the king and his counsellor, disguise themselves as gentlemen. Autolycus, a displaced courtier, becomes a robbed traveller, a peddler, and a courtier again. Prince Florizel transforms from swain to prince to peddler. And Perdita, the lost Princess who thinks she is a shepherdess, changes from festival queen to something anonymous.²⁰ The last exchange of clothes between Florizel, Perdita, and Autolycus (IV.iv.624-59) integrates the trickster, who has thus far interacted only with the rustics, into the main plot. We should note that he becomes involved in the lovers' escape, not by an accident of plot (being in the right place at the right time), but by their ability, like his own, to shape-shift. Perdita may well speak for Autolycus—and everyone else—when she remarks,

I see the play so lies
That I must bear a part.

(655-56)

The lost identities, shown by all the costume changing, particularly those done openly on stage, follows Time's lead and flaunts a dramatic truth.

I earlier described The Winter's Tale as protean, changing before our eyes like its characters who slip in and out of costume. This shape-shifting or metamorphosis—the realized potential—is basic to the romance world, where revelation, whether of a knight's identity or of a story's kind, depends so much on adaptability, on the knight's and thus the reader's ability to keep his balance and discern the truth amidst myriad possibilities. In the fourth act of his own old tale Shakespeare represents several variations on the theme of change. Father Time initiates it by changing the subject from Leontes to Perdita. Camillo and Polixenes complicate it by donning disguises. Autolycus, the chamelion who changes color to fit his setting, amplifies it. But the theme does not reach its fullest orchestration until the fourth scene. Indeed, the word "change" and its synonyms—"transformation," "alters," "exchange"—occur fifteen times in that one scene alone. There we see or hear of transformations at nearly every level, divine, human, chronological, animal, vegetable, each one a deliberate show and each one revealing a hidden truth.

Like any proper pastoral lover Florizel is a disguised prince and to defend his "swain's wearing" he invokes divine practice:

The gods themselves
(Humbling their deities to love) have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them. Jupiter
Became a bull and bellow'd; the green Neptune
A ram and bleated; and the fire-rob'd god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now.

(IV.iv.25-31)

If the great Jove can become an animal, Florizel sees no reason why a prince cannot masquerade as a shepherd. He fittingly selects Ovid's stories as his text, alluding to one of Shakespeare's own sources and advertising the "magic" behind his change. Later in the scene Autolycus satirizes these metamorphoses in his coarse ballads:²¹

Here's another ballad, of a fish that appear'd upon the coast on Wed'n'sday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fadom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. It was thought she was a woman and was turn'd into a cold fish for she would not exchange flesh with one that lov'd her. The ballad is very pitiful, and as true.

(275-86)

Autolycus' puns realize another change: a woman who does not "exchange flesh" with her lover is of course a cold fish. Shakespeare includes Sylvius and Phebe in As You Like It to parody and authenticate the conventionality of Orlando and Roslynde's love. That is, by demonstrating the absurdity of romantic love Shakespeare makes it palpable. So, too, he parodies mythological transformations and pastoral disguises with folk ballad. If Jove can change into a bull and bellow, then why cannot a woman turned fish appear on the "fourscore of April, forty thousand fadom above water"? Both fictions are "very pitiful, and true."

The trueness of change is indeed a matter of deep concern to pastoral romance writers. As we saw in the previous chapter, Spenser combines the pastoral's predeliction for debate or contest with the artist's desire for permanence, following Book Six with an allegorical debat about permanence and change. Like a proper pastoralist Shakespeare too addresses the question of mutability in the brief exchange—a debate—between Perdita and Polixenes.

Appropriate to the topic, Perdita repeats the progress followed by Spenser's Mutabilitie, speaking in terms of the cyclic year:

Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet at summer's death, nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flow'rs o'th' season
Are our carnations and streak'd gillyvors
(Which some call Nature's bastards).

(79-82)

Perdita strives for a natural decorum. To the visiting gentlemen, "men of middle age," she matches flowers "Of middle summer" (107); to Florizel, "I would I had some flow'rs o' th' spring" (113). She talks of "the blasts of January" (111), "the winds of March" (120), and even of "the gods that control natural cycles": Proserpina, Cytherea, and Phoebus. Although she seems attuned to Nature's contrary ways, Perdita distrusts contradiction. She would plant the bastard gillyflowers, "No more than were I painted I would wish / This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me" (101-03). The irony, of course, is that she herself is contrary. Moments before, this pranked up girl and her prince did desire to breed, hoping for "that nuptial, which / We two have sworn shall come" (50-51), and she readily admits to being painted:

You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentle scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend Nature—change it rather; but
The art itself is Nature.

(92-97)

Polixenes believes that the gardener actually changes Nature, just as Perdita supposes that her costume alters her character. And, again like Perdita, Polixenes sets up his own contradictory disposition.²² He will forbid his royal son ever to enter "These rural latches" again, an injunction which ignores his horticultural advice of marrying "A gentle scion to the wildest stock." Thus both disguised characters exhibit contradictory behavior, but a behavior which, paradoxically, hints at the eventual truth: Perdita will marry Florizel with Polixenes' full approval.

To appreciate fully the ironies in this episode we should remember Nature's judgment of Mutabilitie:

I well consider all that ye have sayd,
And find that all things stedfastness do hate
And changed be: yet being rightly wayd
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being doe dilate:
And turning to themselves at length againe,
Do worke their own perfection so by fate:
Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne;
But they raigne ouer change, and doe ther states maintaine.

(FQ, VII.58)

We could do worse than choose Spenser's words as a gloss for The Winter's Tale, The alteration in the appearance of a thing elucidates its nature, a truth just as basic to drama as it is to romance. Polixenes is wrong to suppose that the gardener's art changes Nature: the flower is still a flower for all its piedness. Jove may metamorphose into a bull, but he is no less Jove; the change illustrates his divine prerogative. Perdita desires to breed by a prince because she is a princess. Polixenes forbids the marriage because romantic comedy demands a blocking parent. Both of them act as they do in Whitsun pastorals because they are actors in a pastoral: "I see the play so lies that I must bear a part." All of the central characters in Act IV adopt several parts, each part revealing, not disguising, something new (or true) about them.

Camillo and Autolycus, especially, "worke their own perfection." The act ends with two parallel scenes. In the first, Camillo directs the lovers' costume change and their escape to Sicilia. In the second, Autolycus manages the Shepherd and Clown's passage, as well as his own. These twin episodes answer the section's earlier scenes, the desires of Camillo to return home, of Polixenes to check his son, of Autolycus to fatten his purse, and echo Part One by shipping Perdita to sea again. Further, the congregational flight to Sicilia associates all the characters in one course of action, the central plot of finding that which was lost. Camillo can prophesy:

Methinks I see
Leontes opening his free arms, and weeping
His welcomes forth; asks thee, son, forgiveness,
As 'twere F th' fathers business; kisses the hands
Of your fresh princess; o'er and o'er divides him
'Twixt his unkindness and his kindness: th' one
He chides to hell, and bids the other grow
Faster than thought or time.

(548-54)

He envisions his plot's end, an end, as we shall see, coincident with the play's end, when it too discovers its kind-ness. The Shepherd's decision to reveal his truth about Perdita, a reminder of Part One's end, sets The Winter's Tale's final stage.

Thus it is that the plotting, scheming, planning, disguising, changing, all belong to returning Perdita—and everything else, the play included—to the proper estate. Like the players who don costume after costume, the play itself passes through several stages, each one a new revelation, each one provoking another guess at its true nature. Despite the altered appearance of The Winter's Tale brought off in Part Two, the stock characters, the pastoral setting, the comic plot, the new age, even a different world order, the substance of the play remains the same. Time turns his glass; he does not trade it for another.

In some ways the second section serves as an analogue of the first. For instance, the comic pattern of preparation-license-festivity mocks the prepared surprise pattern found in Part One, mocks because so little surprises in Part Two. Polixenes can make his plans, adopt his disguises and reveal himself at the proper time, with few subtle hints or hidden meanings. Act IV, scenes ii, iii, and iv ridicule Leontes' behavior through Acts I, II, III. His admission of jealousy pairs with Polixenes' proposal to spy, his attempts to convince the court of Hermione's guilt become Autolycus' deception of the Clown, and Apollo's oracle is mimicked by Camillo's prophecy. Once more analogy dominates over the structure of events. The first and second parts are unified by their thematic structure, their matter. In Sicilia we see the tragic implications of mistaken identity and deception; in Bohemia we witness the comic portrayal of disguise and deceit.

A king's mistaken jealousy rules in Sicilia. Although Leontes claims to base his suspicion on appearances, "paddling palms and pinching fingers," once that jealousy gains credibility, at least for himself, he loses all faith in reason. He dismisses past love of and for his wife and friend. He ignores the entire court's protestations. He denies the physical evidence of the baby's likeness to himself. He repudiates Apollo's oracle. In short, Leontes imposes a personal fiction, an internal doubt (witness the number of his asides), on the Sicilian reality. In Bohemia Shakespeare turns Leontes' self-deception outward. We have already noted how the characters broadcast roles make a comedy of their lives. Polixenes openly plans to watch his son. Autolycus openly tricks the Clown. Florizel openly admits his rustic disguise. Perdita openly plays the festival queen. Camillo openly plots his return to Sicilia. In this second section the audience knows something else as well. Every character supposes that Perdita is either a shepherd's daughter or an abandoned bastard, and all their poses and counterposes (except Autolycus') are based on that supposition. They are, of course, mistaken. In this case a Bohemian fiction imposes on their personal realities.

III

With the return to Sicilia we should recognize the legitimacy of the three part division of The Winter's Tale. The change of locale once more predicates an alteration in genre and narrative technique. The play that begins as a tragedy, laced with comedy and pastoral, and turns to pastoral, informed by comedy and romance, finishes as a romance. Perhaps Fitzroy Pyle, in his book-length study of the play, best describes Part Three:

The last act is tightly packed. It has a great deal to do and little space to do it in. It has rapidly to reinstate the thesis figure, Leontes, bring the antithesis into relation with the thesis, and introduce a synthesis. For this purpose it divides into three scenes—interrelated, like the movements of the play itself.²³

Pyle reduces the play to a telling dialectical syllogism, bespeaking his awareness of the play's structure and identifying the final act as instrumental in clinching that structure. Scene one, which begins with unhappy memories and the Bohemian's arrival, fits section one, which starts with happy memories and ends with the flight to Bohemia. Scene two, which reports the joy and betrothal of a verily identified girl, matches section two, which portrays the tribulations of a variously identified girl. And scene three, the statue's metamorphosis, represents the third section itself, a final "movement" (a happy choice) that integrates the world orders of Sicilia and Bohemia, tragic plot and comic plot, mimetic representation and romantic sensation, personal fiction and public display.

Because they interrelate with the play's major divisions, the last three scenes can be associated with stages in the dramatic surprise formula. Leontes' vow to remarry only with Paulina's permission (V.i.69-70) predicts the final outcome, a remarriage. Perdita's return substantiates the oracle's condition that prohibits Leontes from marrying again until "that which is lost be found." The restoration of Hermione to Leontes provides the ironic twist to his remarriage: he indeed marries again, but his new wife is his old wife, thus maintaining the proper estate. The remarriage symbolizes on a mundane level the ending's cosmic implications: "The recognition toward which romance moves is more than a matter of stripping away a few diguises or sorting out a few cases of mistaken identity; it is an epiphany of Apollinian order, clarity, and harmony in the universe."²⁴ Shakespeare shares his vision of an Apollinian order with other romancers, notably Longus, Chaucer, and Spenser, though with one important distinction: Shakespeare achieves his on the stage, where physical limitation prohibits ascending to the eighth sphere or contemplating Revelations. Hermione's surprise re-appearance is the eucatastrophe, a deliberately artificial representation that mirrors the play's magic.

Referring to this scene, Adrien Bonjour says that, "we enjoy the effect produced on the characters of the play much better than if we received at the same time with them the shock of the complete surprise."²⁵ We are not, I think, completely surprised by the plot's ending. Shakespeare takes us into his confidence; we share a more omniscient view, possessing a superior knowledge than that of the purblind characters. Shakespeare drops hints like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs: the path is easily found. Yet the last scene does have special impact, partly because, like the bear scene, it so literally fulfills the predictions, and partly because Shakespeare obscures his destination by not following a well-known trail.

He makes Hermione's return more affecting by downplaying Perdita's reunion with her father. All of our romance experience points to the necessary ending, the reunion of child and father, and the whole of The Winter's Tale supports that expectation. From the moment Leontes asks, in the first section, "Shall I live to see this bastard kneel / And call me father?", we fix our attention on Perdita, awaiting the inevitable moment when she does kneel and claim her father. In order for events to end happily the oracle demands that she be found. We follow Perdita from Sicilia to Bohemia and back to Sicilia again. Time's argument for Act IV involves "what adheres" to Perdita. By the end of the second section, with Camillo bent on forcing Leontes and Polixenes together and the Shepherd bent on producing the heirlooms, we know Perdita's recognition will be swift and sure. Shakespeare even teases us further at the opening of the final part. Seeing Florizel and Perdita together reminds Leontes that, "I lost a couple, that 'twixt heaven and earth / Might thus have stood, begetting wonder" (V.i. 132-33). The announcement of Polixenes' arrival momentarily creates tension, until we remember that the Shepherd stands ready with the trinkets. The moment is at hand.

But we do not see it. At the climactic moment, when her ascending star has reached its zenith, Perdita all but disappears from the play. She speaks only twice in the entire fifth act. True, her presence on stage is important, but her importance is relative to Hermione. The first, and perhaps most surprising, twist at the close of The Winter's Tale is that Perdita plays a supporting role to her mother. Her beauty is remarkable, but only insofar as it reminds Leontes of his wife. Her reunion with her father is joyful, but it is counterbalanced by the loss of Hermione: "Our king, being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his found daughter, as if that joy were now become a loss, cries, 'O, thy mother, thy mother!'" (V.ii.49-52). Even her return, supposedly the solution to the play, is important in terms of Hermione, as the queen herself admits:

for thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv'd
Myself to see the issue.

(V.iii.125-28)

Shakespeare goes beyond mere comparisons, however. He emphasizes Perdita's subsidiary role by withdrawing her "scene" from the play. Directors often complain that the long, drawn-out description of all that joy and all that sorrow is unplayable. Of course it is: that is the point. The Gentleman can remark, ironically, that: "The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes, for by such was it acted" (V.ii.79-81). Obviously so, for we are none of us kings and princes, and none of us is in that audience. The scene is one which we have often seen acted, even (or especially) in Shakespeare. He gives us romantic versions in As You Like It and Pericles, and a tragic version in King Lear. Shakespeare readily admits the conventionality of the reunion: the news is "like an old tale" (28), "like an old tale still" (61). The Gentlemen repeatedly complain of their inability to describe it: "I make a broken delivery of the business" (9); "Then you have lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of (42-3); "I have never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it" (56-58). Evidently our familiarity with father-daughter reunions makes another one unnecessary: it does not have to be seen to be believed.

The ironic means of reporting Perdita's return is the surest sign that Shakespeare will offer something else, something better, some greater miracle with which to close his fiction.²⁶ Frank Kermode, we remember, instructs that our sense of an ending is strengthened when "the fiction under consideration is one of those which, by upsetting the ordinary balance of our naive expectations, is finding something out for us, something real." To be sure, our naive expectations have been upset, but we have not found out "something real." In fact, Shakespeare makes the reunion as unreal as possible. We merely overhear courtiers' gossip. The news is like an old tale. "Such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad makers cannot be able to express it" (23-25). The reunion between father and daughter is such a fiction that one gentleman regards the event with a critic's eye:

One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes (caught the water though not the fish), was when, at the relation of the Queen's death (with the manner how she came to't bravely confessed and lamented by the King), how attentiveness wounded his daughter, till (from one sign of dolor to another) she did (with an "Alas!"), I would fain say, bleed tears; for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was not marble there chang'd color; some swounded, all sorrow'd. If all the world could have seen't, the woe had been universal.

(82-92)

Perdita's reception of her mother's death is "the prettiest touch," one "bravely" acted, that angles for attention. It is a special effect, in which the Gentleman "would fain say" Perdita bled tears. The touch is so affecting that "some swounded, all sorrow'd. If all the world had seen't, the woe had been universal." The Gentleman's conditional statements turn his report into another fiction. Perdita receives rave would-be reviews for a would-be scene.

While evaluating Perdita's performance the Gentleman introduces an even prettier touch. He identifies a number of transformations and indicates the next turn of events. Perdita, for instance, is again linked to the gillyflower: she gets pied in the face, changing "from one sign of dolor to another." Her histrionics angled at eyes and "caught water though not the fish." Autolycus previously sang of a spurning woman turned into a cold fish. Hermione, we next discover, is a spurned woman turned into cold stone. "The revelation of the Queen's death" is, like Autolycus's ballad, a tale "very pitiful, and as true," or so thinks the Gentleman: "Who was not marble there changed color."

Thus, if we are acute, we are prepared for Hermione's transformation. Autolycus's ballad parodies the metamorphoses invoked by Florizel to defend his costume. Ovid's stories also include the tale of Pygmalion, the woman turned to life from stone. That Romano's lifelike statue follows so quickly upon the heels of the recalled transformations and fills so conveniently the void left by Perdita's unseen performance ought to be enough to arouse our suspicions. Even if we are not acute, the accumulation of poses assumed, masks donned, and parts played should have taught us the simple lesson about outward show. Hence Leontes' refrain that "we are mocked with art." Fitzroy Pyle quite mistakenly insists that the audience must believe, with the characters on stage, they are actually witnessing a statue come to life. He is correct, though, to stress the dramatic quality of the statue scene:

The events related in V.ii were, considered in the context of the play, all the more effective for being reported as contrived, posed, arranged as though performed on stage. This event, on the other hand, is and must be performed upon the stage. It must be seen to be believed.²⁷

Shakespeare reverses the procedure followed in V.ii. Where he first narrates a familiar, dramatic scene, he now dramatizes a rare, narrative scene. He audaciously attempts to produce on stage a romance wonder—and he succeeds.

Shakespeare encloses the statue scene within an opposing set of terms, the lifelike and the marvellous, the realistic and the magical. The statue is admired for its perfect imitation of Hermione's "natural posture." One stands before her in hope of answer. We are told to prepare "To see the life as lively mock'd as ever / Still sleep mock'd death" (V.ii. 19-20). Leontes can ask, "Would you not deem it breath'd?" (64), and Polixenes can agree, "The very life seems warm upon her lip" (66). Far from a mundane response, however, this mimetic masterpiece by that "rare Italian" who, like Father Time and the playwright, "would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape" (V.ii.99-100), strikes awe into its audience. They regard it as a "wonder" (22), an "amazement" (87), a "marvel" (100). Leontes apostrophizes:

O royal piece,
There's magic in thy majesty, which has
My evils eonjur'd to remembrance.

(38-40)

And indeed, Paulina does turn to conjuring to transform the inanimate statue into animate woman, her incantation rousing Leontes to proclaim, "If this be magic, let it be an art/Lawful as eating." (110-11)

We are mocked with art because the whole episode is a charade. Hermione never was dead, never a statue, except to pretense. She merely has "preserv'd" herself these sixteen years. Paulina pretends to be a magician, producing a play, setting the stage, preparing the audience, building suspense, displaying her final trick, one done, I am tempted to add, with mirrors. Her art is lawful, for it is a literary art. The "magic" needed for her play's success is audience belief: "It is requir'd / You do awake your faith" (94-95).²⁸ Once Leontes admits his desire for Hermione, Paulina need only show the statue, tease about wet paint, and announce her power to "make the statue move" to apprehend Leontes' fixed attention: "Proceed, / No foot shall stir" (97-98). He will see the statue alive, regardless of "wicked powers" or "unlawful business." His willingness to believe Hermione adulterous begins the play; his belief in her rebirth ends it. In the interim, as Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, Bohemia has come to Sicilia, complete with its faith in fairies and its predilection for play, and Leontes realizes his, and his wife's, comic potential. Perhaps the final and most telling irony of The Winter's Tale is that no one objects to Paulina's joke. That Hermione has been alive, at court, for sixteen years bothers Leontes not in the least. Our characters, each of whom stages his own little play, appreciate a finely wrought fiction. Like Tinkerbell, art cannot be sustained without attention, without its audience's faith, and, again like Tinkerbell, it begs for it.

As we should expect from previous romance experience, the eucatastrophe does not resolve the play's conflicts, real or imaginary. F. R. Foakes believes that the final scene "holds the paradoxes in suspension, for they cannot be resolved."²⁹ Shakespeare chooses that moment when the play reaches its fullest, densest, and yet clearest statement of generic identity to dissolve his fiction. To compose his final arrangement he combines opposites. The mimetic and the marvellous we have noted, but others can be added, Camillo listing several in one speech:³⁰

My lord, your sorrow was too sore laid on
Which sixteen winters cannot blow away,
So many summers dry. Scarce any joy
Did ever so long live; no sorrow
But kill'd much sooner.

(49-53)

The oppositions belong to nature, emotion, time: winter/summer, live/kill'd, joy/sorrow, so long/much sooner—all of which resonate through the play. The sentence structure yokes antithetical phrases, yet, through parallelism, balances their meaning, and as with all balanced oppositions, the terms are cancelled. Thus, when Paulina contrives her little drama about a mythical metamorphosis, when she mocks Shakespeare's transformation of Pandosto into The Winter's Tale, the play made from prophecy and surprise, tragic consequences and pastoral license, the credible and the incredible, prepares to make its end.

Leontes' last speech empties the stage. Complemented by his queen and flushed with his renewed role of King, Leontes now assumes the functions of stage manager and epilogue. He forbids Paulina her intended role as pathetic widow ("I, an old turtle, / Will wing me to some wither'd bow") and forces the demands of genre upon her. He summarizes the plot, begging forgiveness from both Hermione and Polixenes for his "ill-suspicion" and verifying Florizel and Perdita's troth-plight. More importantly, he draws a final, emphatic line between the worlds of the play and the world outside the play:

Good Paulina,
Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
Each one demand and answer to his part

The ending has met the beginning. "Since first we were dissever'd" connects with Camillo's opening observation about the friendship "which cannot choose but branch now," not to mention the original severance of "play" time and "real" time. "This wide gap of time" directly refers to Father Time's prologue, as well as alludes to the time expired during which each of these actors "his part / Perform'd." The characters are, after all, only characters; they exist only in stories, and to keep themselves alive they exit to swap tales, revealing the wooden O, the enclosed space that literally shapes the play, and leaving it vacant.

The Winter's Tale is about winter's tales, tall stories about wonderfull successes achieved against impossible odds. We remember the references to tales and tale-telling, plays and playwrighting, and know that Shakespeare "wrights" a play about romance. He takes a prose romance for a source, transforming its narrative order of fulfilled prophecy into the dramatic prepared surprise. He uses the stage as the space that encloses the other world, a space mirrored by the pastoral island. He pours the heart's blood of romance, mutability, the principle that all things must pass, into the play. The characters change their clothes, change their roles, change their locales, change their hearts. They allude to divine, natural, human, and literary change. They debate the ethics of change. They believe in change, the play ending with the players producing a scene modelled on an Ovidian metamorphosis. When all is said and done, when even the play has shifted genres, The Winter's Tale works its own perfection and does its state maintain.

Like many others before him, Shakespeare addresses mutability by making a fiction about it; yet in the end the fiction itself is transitory. Where others seek the permanence of print for their stories, Shakespeare chooses to dramatize his. We must think a moment of the implications. We need only flip Malory's book over to begin again, to turn from apocalypse to creation. The theatre audience lacks that option. We can come again another night, but as everyone knows, as Shakespeare knew, another performance means another play. Our experience of a closed dramatic romance is a golden age, unique, permanent, inviolate, ephemeral, never to be had again.

Notes

¹ Walter F. Eggers, Jr., "Genre and Affective Distance—The Example of The Winter's Tale" Genre, 10 (1977), 30-31. For more complete discussions of genre identification, see E. D. Hirsch's chapter, "The Concept of Genre," in Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1967), and Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973).

² The two standard discussions of the pastoral, romance, and tragicomic backgrounds to The Winter's Tale are E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romantic Tradition (London: Staples Press, 1949), especially chapter one, and Hallett Smith, Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974. Also consult Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), 243-83.

³ Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972), 10-16, 212-16. The legacy of Greek romance has been studied by Samuel Lee Woolf, The Greek Romances and Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Press of the New Era Printing Co., 1912) and Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1970).

⁴ Felperin, 52.

⁵ Fitzroy Pyle, The Winter's Tale: A Commentary on the Structure (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 149.

⁶Aristotle's Poetics, trans. Leon Golden, commentary O. B. Hardison (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 27.

⁷ Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (1966; rpt. London: Oxford UP, 1973), 65-67. For an excellent survey of the interpretation and application of the unities of time, place, and action in Renaissance critical theory, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961).

⁸ All references made to Shakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

⁹ William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1973), 59. Richard Lanham, in a thoughtul study, characterizes Western man as a combination of "serious" man, epitomized by Plato, and "rhetorical" or playful man, epitomized by Ovid; he then traces the expression of Ovidian man in several Renaissance works: Motives of Eloquence (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976). F. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1971), notices that Shakespeare distances the action and the characters of The Winter's Tale "by making us continually aware of the incredible fictiveness of the action, by exposing what he is doing with a conscious and often blatant theatricality" (78).

¹⁰ The disparity between descriptions of characters and events and their presentation has been studied by Janet Adelmen, "Character and Knowledge," Twentieth Century Interpretations of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1977) 118-25.

¹¹ Northrop Frye, "Recognition in The Winter's Tale," in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honour of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 241. Among those who agree with Frye are Hallett Smith, who calls the eruption "a sudden seizure, a perturbation of the mind" (101-02), and G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London: Oxford UP, 1947), 94, who claims Leontes "has allowed himself to be temporarily possessed." On the other side are Neville Coghill, "Six Points of Stagecraft," Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale: A Casebook, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Macmillan, 1968), 199202, and John Lawlor, "Pandosto and the Nature of Dramatic Romance," PQ, 41 (1962), 96-113.

¹² Robert Greene, Pandosto in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VIII, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 156-58.

¹³ Coghill' s essay examines how "contrivance works" in six key scenes—Leontes' jealousy, the bear, Father Time, the exchange of clothes between Perdita, Florizel, and Autolycus, the report of Perdita's return, and the statue (198-213).

¹⁴ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson, eds., The Winter's Tale (1931; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959), xx; Coghill, 202-05; in basic agreement with Coghill is Dennis Biggins, " 'Exit Pursued by a Beare': A Problem in The Winter's Tale, " Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), 8.

¹⁵The Winter's Tale: A Study (London: Staples Press, 1947), 52.

¹⁶ Colie, Living Art, 248, explains that the pastoral elegy "offers a marvellous rationale for death," a fusion of the shepherd-poet and his inspiration, a creation of a "world of imagination in which, depending on his temperment, he could live as he would." In a sense the pastoral world offers both an after-life and an alter-life. It is at the moment of Antigonus' death, Colie notices (268), that the pastoral in The Winter's Tale begins. As we shall see, the pastoral elements start much earlier, but it certainly takes over at this point.

¹⁷ Knight, 86, and Bethel, 59-61, both mention the comic possibilities of Leontes' jealousy.

¹⁸ Norman Rabkin writes that Shakespeare's romances call "attention to the fact that what we are experiencing is art, not life, whether by the use of such awkward playwright surrogates as Time or Gower, or the incessant allusions to stage performance, or the drama of real characters in fairy-tale gardens, or sudden changes from tragedy to comedy, or in The Tempest the clear implication that Prospero is in some way to be thought of as analogous to the author of the play": "The Holy Sinner and the Confidence Man: Illusion in Shakespeare's Romances," in Four Essays on Romance, ed. Herschel Baker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971) 36-37. Two studies more fully investigate the matter of self-reflexivity in Shakespeare's art and, more particularly, of the various persona adopted by the playwright: James Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971) and, more recently, Alvin B Kernan, The Playwright as Magician (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).

¹⁹A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia UP, 1965, 92.

²⁰ In Act IV, Foakes aptly remarks, "clothes seem to make the man." He sees the series of disguises as transformations that culminate in the statue scene (134-135).

²¹ Rabkin, 50-53

²² Of this debate Rosalie Colie has written: "With these literary or generic or social mixes, comes also moral mixture, a mixture of ways of life set in actual or implied contradistinction or even contradiction"( Living Art, 253). We note that the mixture of roles, "ways of life," within a character, not between them, creates the conflicts, much as it does in chivalric romance.

²³ Pyle, 153. Compare Pyle's statement to the following quotation from Guarini, Il Pastor Fido e il compendio della poesia tragicomica, ed. Gioachino Brognoligo (Bari, 1914), 282:

Now this untying has three parts worthy of consideration: the first is employed in the preparation of the matter, and is the most important of all; the second is the act itself by which the untying of the knot and the reversal of the action takes place; the third is entirely filled with delight and joy, according to the true end of tragicomic poetry.

Found in May Elizabeth Campbell, The Winters Tale: A Study in Shakespeare's Late Plays with Special Reference to Guarini's Theory of Tragicomedy, Diss. University of North Carolina 1970 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1971). Campbell's translation.

²⁴ Felperin, 25.

²⁵ "The Final Scene of The Winter's Tale," English Studies, 33 (1952), 198-201.

²⁶ Felperin, 17: "It is the central place that Shakespearean comedy and romance accords to the extraordinary in experience which distinguishes it from the other tradition of comedy that presents, in Sidney's phrase, 'the common errors of our life,' and which enables it to add the effect of 'wonder' to the 'delight' of most comedy."

²⁷ Pyle argues that in the last scene "the effect aimed at is that of a statue coming to life, not of a woman pretending to be a statue and pretending to come to life" (122-23). In keeping with the theatrical bravura of the play, I rather think the final scene should have the flavor of an amateur production, one not much more refined than Quince's. We ought to see a woman pretending to be a statue and pretending to come to life.

²⁸ Frye cautions against investigating too deeply the credibility of the statue scene, for it is more on the level of wish fulfillment (like Bottom's dream) than 'historical' event. He draws a distinction between actual belief and the desire to believe: "The world we are looking at in the conclusion of The Winter's Tale is not an object of belief so much as an object of desire." He links this world to that of Leontes' jealousy: "the world of Leontes' jealousy does not exist at all; only the consequences of believing in it exist" (Natural Perspective, 117). Shakespeare blurs this distinction; when we awake our faith we lend any fiction credibility.

²⁹ Foakes, 144.

³⁰ Traversi, 108, notes that Camillo also opens the play with a speech (I.i.21-32) that combines "under one set of images two processes apparently contradictory—that of natural unified development existing side by side with widening division." That Camillo should combine opposites at the close of the play is no accident.